Depression

Sometimes the world feels like its crumbling around you but instead of the Earth breaking away from you, it feels like your own body is falling away.  I was taking care of some children today at work and teaching them how to play frisbee.  They really enjoyed learning and they even showed me a new way to throw one.  I don’t know how it worked, but I just accepted it and watched in wonder.  Sometimes you pick up on the subtler things like someone noticing you or getting a call from a friendly voice.  Gabor Mate

Today I decided to get a lot of chores done because having a clean house is always uplifting.  Especially when you have company (Khaleesi watching and begging for food).  I can’t say she begs, but we have this understanding between us.  When she looks up at a cupboard, or hops on a chair in front of a closet, I know she is telling me something.  Because usually her day consists of watching Cat TV (out the window or balcony) and not being bothered by me.  However, sometimes she will start randomly climbing her tree in our bedroom and kick wildly against the twine column.  On a side note, I enjoy watching her sleep at the end of our bed and have that heavy sensation in the front of her face. (She lays her chin completely down against the bed where I know she is comfortable and about to start dreaming.  Lately she has been very energetic and dreaming vividly as well, her paws stretch and shake while her tail vibrates and shakes.  She’s probably chasing imaginary birds because earlier she made a giants leap off the bed when she heard a flock of birds flying past our balcony!  (OMG She might catch one if it flies through the net!)

Back to the human reality, I made some deviled eggs after talking with my grandmother today.  She always made the best deviled eggs and Im proud to say my first attempt is a big success thanks to Sofie and her cooking lessons.  Before I met Sofie, I probably couldn’t cook a decent hamburger or hotdog because I had grown up with my dad or uncle always managing the grill.  Even fourth of July and Memorial Day weekends didn’t have me firing up any grills, probably because I’m not a huge fan of steak.  Any who, Sofie started me off slowly and I began cutting vegetables in the beginning (I can’t really handle cutting meat because it just grosses me out, chicken especially.) but onions, peppers, lettuce, tomatoes, I could handle them all thanks to her.  She’s showed me so many things over the past 5 years, and she continues showing me new things every day.  I love her immensely for the things she has taught me and many other things.  Mostly the way she laughs when were out with friends or family.  It feels impossible to not relate to her or have a positive experience with her because she’s so caring and so warm.  Sometimes when I have those dark thoughts surging up through my super-ego it brings me to my knees, but when I think of her and our future together it makes me feel relaxed and aimed towards a goal.

The surge of emotions I’m talking about is what my brother and I like to call “The Storm” because seemingly out of nowhere a person can be or feel crippled by the world or mind closing in on your personality.  It feels as if a rising storm surge is spattering against the rocks of your foundations and the tide slowly rises with the incoming category 4 or 5 hurricane beading down your walls and hoping they won’t crack before the storm subsides. Inevitably, the storm does go away, I feel myself coming back to reality and reasoning it is going to be okay.  The sun shine comes and my thoughts are clear again, the only problem is holding out for that storm to subside.  Usually I have these thoughts late at night when I am alone with my thoughts.  The English psychiatrist R. D. Lang said “There are three things people fear most, their own death, other people, and their own mind.”  I couldnt agree more with the last part because at times it feels like my mind is completely going back and forth without a rational way of dealing with it.  How do we get over this, alone time with our brains create an uneasiness that I think most people can understand.  Its partly why I wind up here on the internet and writing to everyone.  I know other people out there like to hear or read the same things they may be feeling at the same particular moment or like I consider when needing a voice of reason I listen to Stefan.  I recently subscribed to his listenership and I am contemplating writing in to his show to see what kind of debates or ideas I can bring up together.  I am half scared I will end up being unsure and messing up the show by not answering consistently or proficiently.  What else can I say than YOLO and do some preparation and go for it!

“This was one of the best moments in my life.  Rhode Island with my Honey Bunny.”

— Justin —

Long distance relationship

I feel like it’s my turn to write something here now. My fiancé, Justin, has a lot on his mind which you probably have noticed by now. I can feel already that this is going to be quite a mixed blog, which is fun! I will share both thoughts, but I think it’s a lot of fun to show what we do during the days as well. You’ll just have to follow the journey of this blog and see what happens.

Justin and I have been together for almost five years now. Looking back it feels insane! We met in Annapolis, Maryland. I was an Au Pair for a few months and Justin studied at the Naval Academy. If you haven’t been in Annapolis I highly recommend it, men and women in hot white uniforms all over! Anyway. We met through common friends at a party and I can honestly say that I was not that interested at first (if you ask Justin he will say that I could not stop staring at him though). Nonetheless, we ended up spending the entire evening together and having so much fun. He was honest. Fun. Had amazing beautiful eyes. And showed a lot of interest in me. The swedish girl.

After dating for a month I was moving back to Sweden and we had to decide, should we be just friends or should we try to become a couple? Justin said he wanted to just be friends. And I got super bummed. Either way I convinced him that we should give it a try and I was no longer single when I came home to Sweden.

After being back in Sweden for a week I booked another trip to Pensacola, USA (to where he moved) and my parents and all my friends thought I was crazy. Everybody thought “this is never going to last”. We traveled back and forth for two years. It was tough. The longest time we were away from each other was for 8,5 months. Thank God for Skype! A distance relationship is nothing I would recommend to anybody. It’s heartbreaking and lonely. However, looking back at it now, when we’ve lived together for three years, I feel like it was so worth it. I have a man that I can say moved half around the world just to be with me. That’s pretty darn romantic, I must say.

Below is a picture of Justin and I on our first date, which was at a garden party.

— Sofie —

What is love?

The definition prescribed by my mentor Stefan Molyneux is that love is related to virtue, and how our virtues measure up with our partner meaning they agree with your virtues.  For example, not beating your children or partner, never yelling or raising your voice to another, or never calling each other names are virtues we can and should all ascribe to.  Stefans definition is also related to philosophical ideas.  Virtues were developed by philosophers like Aristotle and expanded upon by writers like Ayn Rand.  Rands definition of virtue was focused on the vice: Altruism.  She described altruism as the suffering of one to benefit the other.  This is particularly intriguing for me because if you love someone out of duty or honor or subservience, it is not out of the goodness of your being.  Instead its a focus on sacrificing your happiness for the happiness of others.  As I described before, Universally Preferable Behavior is a concept I am sticking meticulously towards because it benefits all parties involved, not just public entities but private and familial relationships too.  Family relationships and friends are vital for the trust and reliability to benefit each other.

Altruism, the opposite, or vice of Objectivism is the universally preferable behavior for all parties involved because it is deemed a win-win scenario in most cases for those involved.  Some specific scenarios like, if hitler and churchill were both drowning in a lake, you would save churchill and abandon hitler because saving an evil entity for the sake of altruism is a great injustice towards humanity.  In other words, performing an act of saving another life is only valid if you could not bear to live without that person.  If your wife or husband was drowning and you decided it would be unbearable to live without that person, you would jump into the icy cold waters and save their life and potentially killing yourself would be a greater benefit to you and your family than if your wife or husband were left to drown.  I could not bear to see myself live alone without my fiancee and therefore would have to go in and save her otherwise i would feel my life was pointless.  Or maybe I couldn’t forgive myself if I froze up and let her die and thus would have serious regrets later on.  Regrets are not unusual though, and people that die saying “I have no regrets” are liars and cowards because that means they don’t regret bullying or hurting another person they love in a prior situation.

I regret plenty of things in my life, I regret spending four years with my prior girlfriend before Sofie.  I regret pushing her and yelling at her.  I regret hurting my brother and sister in our childhood years, bullying them, antagonizing them, and patronizing them.  I regret hurting my friends Kevin by telling him to lose weight, and hitting my first girlfriend and simultaneously getting into a car accident because of it.  I rammed my car into the house, and it was a very scary moment for me.  My rage has been my ultimate regret because it has been used unsuccessfully to make myself feel better and has poisoned my relationships in the past.  Today, however, I am confronting my rage, my personal injustices and I feel great knowing I can control my anger so that it doesn’t become an uncontrollable rage.  Just now I knocked over some cookies and a lotion bottle from my night stand.  My immediate thought was, anger.  Why am I agree at knocking something over? It happens.  When Sofie knocks something over or hurts herself I don’t get mad and she has taught me to be more empathetic.  Why am I not empathetic you may ask, because the reason I feel anger when knocking something over, or if I trip myself, or hit my knee on the bedside.  Its because my fathers words are still inside telling me I am worthless, Im a klutz, or a bozo, or a dumb ass, or a person that shouldn’t be making mistakes.  I have lived in Sweden for nearly 3 years now, and spent 9 years in the U.S. military prior to this.  I have been away from home for several years, and I have discovered why I made such a good soldier…

My whole military career I was never good at much, my shining virtue or vice in the military was that I was good at taking orders.  This is a dangerous aspect of altruism as I will explain.  The soldiers in the second world war did not question sending jews into gas chambers and killing six million jews.  Altruism is taking the ideas of a megalomaniac and letting them tell you to kill others based on a false ideology.  Instead of talking things out and solving matters with discussion, they called upon soldiers to carry out the good of their country by sacrificing themselves and laying down their free will to kill in terms of an irrational cause.  This is why religion and governments are so dangerous because they take things by force (taxes and wars and arresting) people who do not obey their laws.  92% of americas prisoners are non-violent offenders meaning they are the failed result of the war on drugs.  Governments are only supposed to be there to keep violence off the streets, not arrest drug addicts and users.  But I will save this subject for another time.

My altruism was planted in my deep childhood recesses.  Starting with my circumcision, my brain told me the world did not want me, it wanted to hurt me.  So I developed an insane fear of needles and my dad would yell at me whenever I knocked things over even as a baby and toddler.  How does this make sense?  Abuse and yelling and neglect or abandonment are all actions our parents have over us children.  Defenseless children do not have a choice who their parents will be.  They only have a choice to how they can channel it.  Addiction comes from failed brain circuits developing and result in external medicine needed.  Addiction is a disease, not a crime, and these people are willing to waste away because of it.  “its not death they fear, its LIFE that they fear” because they’ve been raised in a world that tells them they are unwanted.  They are not needed and as a result their brain develops misshapen.  Doctors can look at PET scans and actually see the brain is damaged and does not develop absolutely necessary neural pathways needed for successful brain function.

Justin

The American

I have been listening to podcaster, his name is Stefan Molyneux.  He has been my current voice of reason whenever Sofie isn’t busy keeping me grounded (she works a lot and i have a lot on my mind.)  He often reminds me of the troubled childhood I had and I feel liberated to start journaling or blogging.  (Special thanks to Sofie for starting this.)  I have thoughts constantly, train of thought is more than just an expression, its literally a train that never ends, and my train is especially long in the wee hours of the night when I am awake doing homework for my masters online.  Back to the voice of reason, lately its come to my attention on the cultural differences between Sweden and America.  For one, Sofie and I talked about having kids and whether we would have our boys circumcised.  At the time, I didn’t give it a second thought, but sofie explained that it was illegal to get circumcised here in Sweden. (We found out later, its not illegal but requires both parents approval.)  This was a few years ago when I was battling an undiscovered condition in my body called Vitamin B deficiency. (It led to me developing very low energy throughout the day and I would have maybe 2-4 hours max of feeling alert.  Sofies been a great help and we both discovered this horrible health condition in January.  (Im much better now.)  Im also prone to wild and voracious tangents so I will have to come back and shorten this.

Circumcision, or known as genital mutilation is something I have investigated for my future children and family children because I never understood how horrible this procedure actually is.  Its brutal, its barbaric, and I hurt thinking about Stefans video showing an actual baby being circumcised, with no anaesthetic, and is strapped spread eagle.  How could doctors think babies did not feel pain again?  I hear it was recently discovered in 90s that children can feel pain, and it makes me wonder what effect this procedure had on me as a child.  Statistically, Im more prone to feeling pain.  I used to be scared to death of the shots I would get as a child.  Now I know why.  I literally would fight my doctors and my own mother when I would get a shot.  I am still contemplating how I will confront my parents about how they could let this happen to me.  If they saw the video I saw, or investigated the way I did.  We wouldn’t have this discussion, I hope.  At least give me the fucking courtesy of having a choice about this as an adult or teenager.  Um, let me think about this, do I want half my erogenous tissue chopped off and causing 4.5 times greater chance of developing erectile disfunction? No.  I will take the time to pull things back and clean up shop every time I shower, just like I do anyways.

Im sitting here thinking to myself, am I really starting a blog talking about the discussion of circumcision…  You’re probably reading this and saying Im not sure if I even like this person yet, but I will continue anyways.  Because this needs to be said.  Male/Female circumcision is wrong, especially when done to babies who have no fucking anaesthetic and even the topical anesthetic given today doesn’t come close to covering the pain felt.  I dare you to go watch it being done and think I would let this happen to my child.  Because you are a barbarian.  I will update everyone how it goes when I do talk to my mother, and then my father.  Ive lately opened up some deeper channels via self-exploration and talking to my grandparents opens up why I am thinking about these issues.  Because it comes down to my earlier mentioning, child abuse.  My father beat me with a belt if I misbehaved and up until I was 24 years old I thought this was acceptable because I was being a mischievous boy.  When I told my counselor this, she told me a child can learn from right and wrong without a belt or spanking, and thats why it is illegal.  Truer words couldn’t have been spoken, because the abuse, circumcision all pain damaged my brain literally and re-wired it into this machine looking for answers.

I recently discovered why I get angry at myself for dropping something, or tripping, or having an accident.  Because my fathers voice is instantly in my head telling me I’m a fucking moron, idiot, coming up short, etc.  However, when my dad fucks up, he’s in denial and refuses to admit he was wrong, until recently when I corrected him for calling me a name.  He was so quick to blame others for his name calling, but wouldn’t actually own up to it until I discussed its about respect.  I would never call him a name and its out of fear and respect for him, and he taught me respect goes both ways and must be earned, etc.  How can you hold someone else to these standards if you aren’t holding them to yourself?  Which brings me to my competition or grounding mechanism.  Universally Preferable Behavior and the Non-Aggresson Principle applied by libertarians, meaning the use of force or violence will never be used on another person.  This includes spanking, yelling, name calling.  Three iron clad rules Sofie and I have are: Never yell at each other, Never call each other names, and never hit or discipline each other because we are human beings, its the 21st century.  We can use our minds and our mouths and ears to communicate our disagreements instead of beating each other.  Just because you are a parent does not give you the right to hit a defenseless child who cannot choose his parents or circumcise him against his will.

Justin

A small introduction

We’re a couple living in southern Sweden. Three years ago, the 11 of April 2012, Justin first came to Sweden, left his life in the USA and moved here to be with me (Sofie). First we lived in Gävle where I studied International Social Work. There we adopted a cat whom we adore and named her Khaleesi.

In this blog you’re going to be able to take part of our life together and we’re both going to share our thoughts and daily lives. Hope you’ll enjoy it!

This is our little beast Khaleesi – the mother of dragons.